Minimum selection GSC and adaptive low-power rake combining scheme

In this paper, we investigate a new generalized selection combining (GSC) technique and an adaptive low-power rake combining scheme to save the power consumption of mobile rake receivers for wideband CDMA systems. The new GSC technique called minimum selection GSC (MS-GSC) selects a minimum number of rake fingers as long as the combined SNR is larger than a given threshold. The proposed rake combining scheme adaptively adjusts the threshold value to maintain the desired BER, in which a GSC dynamically selects rake fingers to meet the given threshold condition. The proposed MS-GSC shows a low standard deviation in bit error statistics and advantages practical implementation. The proposed adaptive scheme works well with existing GSC schemes as well as the proposed MS-GSC. The proposed scheme reduced the power consumption of a mobile rake receiver up to 67.8% by turning off unselected rake fingers.